Peaks and Valleys

Sweet. A blog post about a dream I had last night. Snore, right?

But seriously. We were on a balcony of a very, very tall high-rise building. Actually, we thought were were on the balcony, but later realized we were actually hovering near it in a basket trailing from a helicopter. For a girl with a moderate fear of heights, this was a nervous-making thing. After what seemed like forever in that state, the helicopter finally took off, soaring away from the building, carrying only me now in its basket, and then lowered gracefully so that my basket was gliding over the clearest Caribbean-looking ocean imaginable, where the sea was the faintest shade of blue, but mostly only showed right through to the sand below. It was heavenly. I was getting ready to drop in for a swim.

...and then a private caller woke me up at 6 a.m. for the second time this week. I will get you if I find you.

I'm sure this dreaming of heights, of soaring, of potentially plummeting, has something to do with the Grand Canyon trek, kicking off in T minus two days now. Two!

Temperature range: forecast at 39 to 108 degrees. Approximate percent grade for much of the way up: 15. Friends crazy enough to attempt: Nine, including me.

Subject line of today's pre-hike thread: "Just to add to your anxiety..."

Notable graf contained therein: "Apparently there is also a slight chance of showers this weekend. Which sounds kind of wonderful in 105-degree heat, but I have no idea what that means in terms of lightening killing us on the trail. Never fear... it's not likely, statistically, to kill more than one of us. That's only a one in nine chance you'll be fried."

Whew! Cake.

Beware of Women Who Make Lists

That was the punch line of some comic strip ADG and I read in college. And we found it perplexing and not funny. Because we know that women who make lists are the best kinds.

With the big Grand Canyon hike near on the horizon, by now I'd be knee deep in lists, and many of the items on those would be crossed off already. But I got distracted (not my style, but "life comes at you fast," as the commercials say). So it's T minus eight days until departure and I'm... listless.

You see, there is a lot to think about when packing for the Grand Canyon hike. The temperature at the top rim is supposed to be something like 30 degrees cooler than the temperature at the bottom. At the top, we'll be car camping and can bring luxuries like air mattresses and real pillows. For the bottom, it's whatever you can cram in your pack and carry first all the way down and then all the way up without dying. It's supposed to be like 9 million degrees, or really, above 100. So even if my booty is in shape for this (and even that is questionable), my lists lag woefully behind.

But there's time. I bought a new pack with a solid frame and a camping pad from REI, plus some mysterious dehydrated food packages that become lasagna when you reconstitute them. Just this week I've bought six Clif bars and replaced the battery in my trusty Polar heart rate monitor, which I am counting on to tell me among many other things that I burned 10,000 calories over the two-day trek. Coupled with the info on LP's pedometer, I should be able to sate my voracious appetite for information. I need data. I'm like a data vampire.

Next up, I think I'll buy a dependable visor or hat (the desperate need for sun protection is as much about vanity as anything else, but hey, at least I know myself) and maybe a new tank top with built-in sports bra that will have to be up to a serious task.

List making aside, one benefit of recent distractions is that I have not been devouring every blog ever written on hiking the Grand Canyon by way of the Bright Angel trail. (This so-called preparation did not help me before Half Dome last year.) In the only one I read several months ago, some lesbians faced serious complications from heat exhaustion and vomited uncontrollably. Or something like that; I kind of blocked it out.

Anyway, regular readers of this blog will appreciate the great symbol it will be if I manage to claw myself out of a giant hole in the earth. And you know what, y'all? It's on.

Ode to a Butt Whooping

I must be on the come-up because no impaired woman could endure the rigors of Beautiful Booty class followed immediately by Cardio Kickboxing (nor do I think most sane women would even attempt it on a normal day). I totally enjoyed it too.

Put "she lived and died by her jump squats" on my epitaph if I collapse. And I mean that in the most loving way.

**

For jump squats: "Start in a deep squat position with your arms folded out in front of your body. From this position, explosively jump up as high as you can and reach for the ceiling with your hands as you jump. Repeat this until failure."

What Has Helped and What Hasn't

HAS
Don't Mess With the Zohan (surprisingly)
Game 5
The company of friends
The Fowler Museum
Getting my house cleaned by other people who aren't me
Working out (Man, that is sick. Slash healthy.)

HASN'T
The sadistic Facebook broken-heart icon
Wine
Game 4
Thinking
Shopping
Eating
Rejiggering vacation plans
Paying $4.67 at the gas station this morning for regular unleaded
Trying to get perspective by conjuring Darfur

Lucky Girl

"Whatever you need, girl, we're here for you."

"I dedicated my yoga practice to you. Did you feel the strength and the peace?"

"We all think it would be a good idea to see your girls if you can muster the strength. Would it help to talk? Or would it help to listen to others' trivial problems? Or would it help to tell fart jokes all evening? Just say the word."

"I will continue to pray that you find love and joy of a more permanent sort and peace in the meantime. Om."

"Since you're probably feeling fatigued anyway, why not perk up your bathroom a little with new paint? I will send out feelers to the girls and work on a painting-party spreadsheet. Nothing makes me feel good like a) making a fabulous list, and b) getting stuff on it accomplished."

"In the end, you discover that you are a wiser, richer, fuller person for the experience. In the meantime, we have friends, family, and vacation! Not to mention shopping, countless hours at the gym, and martinis with the girls. I love you endlessly."

"I have Xanax."

"Take the day off! We'll go to the beach, shop for 'kinis, drink beer at the beach bars, and lick our wounds."

"We are women and don't have the option to dither forever on whether we want a family or not. It's important that you are faithful to your future self and your dreams of having a family. Love your broken heart, because your heart is what makes you so special. It brings pain, but it also brings you so much joy."

"I'll treat you to a private Pilates lesson."

"I love you lots! Call me whenever you are ready. Or I will harass you."

"Should we meet at someone's house instead of a public space? You know, for maximum huggability? Just hugging and being hugged releases good drugs in the brain. It'll help."

"I know it hurts now, but when you find the right person, you will have joy for the rest of your life. I love you with all my heart. You are so strong. This is a new beginning, a new adventure."

Love

Me: mom was kind of a star yesterday because she asked me a million times
if i would like something to eat
and i cried over the questions a million times
and shook my head no
no i will not eat
then she put the matzah ball soup in front of me
and i ate it
and i was nourished

ED: cute
that's like a poem
sort of like a cross between shel silverstein
and a psalm

Everything in Moderation

I covered a party last night that featured an M.I.A. performance that began at 11:30 p.m. This was a) pretty good, since I'm totally obsessed with M.I.A. since the blue-eyed boy brought her CD on our Yucatan trip and we logged 1,100 kilometers in the Tsuru listening to it, and since I rocked out to her at Coachella with the girls. But also it was b) pretty lousy because I had an 8:30 a.m. meeting this morning. So today I dragged. And dragged. And...zzz..zzz..z. Wait, what? I'm up.

After work, I went to the gym intending to make my own workout, probably 60 to 65 minutes on the elliptical with three-pound hand weights for light but sustained upper-body work, while watching some trashy reality show along the lines of Tila Tequila: Shot at Love. And then, instead, I guilted myself into taking the super-hard Body Design class. The instructor is great but instead of saying stuff like, "You can modify this one if you need to," he says things like, "You must keep up or you must leave. What's the point if you do it wrong?"

I felt every excruciating moment of that hour, but as I was leaving, I was feeling really smug, really proud of myself for undertaking the challenge when I could have fully justifiably gone easier on myself. I was busily making sweeping proclamations in my head about how important it is to continually take oneself out of one's comfort zone to gain rewards....

...when, as I was putting my weights away after class, my gymfriend said to me, "So, Alice, you staying for Ab Lab?" No. Shoot.

Damn. And the girl thought she had an angle.

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Memorial Day Weekend: By the Numbers

1.5 loads of laundry done (goal: 2)

2 out of 5 total Planet Earth DVDs watched on a 46-inch HD TV (obsessed), along with at least

5 episodes of the Deadliest Catch marathon

1 kick-butt 90-minute massage session

1 Lakers loss

70 degrees, or maybe not even, for a high temperature (boo)

$150 spent on a new blue polka-dot dress at Intuition (marked down from $310)

2 fancy cocktails consumed at Seven Grand downtown

1 new in-joke, at least (involving the "Pita-Pizza Connection")

45 minutes spent at the new Americana at Brand complex, competing for elbow room with about...

20 billion other shoppers

3 workouts since Friday evening, including 2 solid Hard Body Meltdown classes for a total of...

1,250 calories burned, which hardly neutralizes approximately...

50,000 calories consumed at...

3 barbecues, including

1 that was totally saturated with meats and meat paraphernalia, where I ate mostly desserts, and

1 that was almost fully vegetarian and included

1 recipe that I want to steal (portabella burgers with feta, pearl onions, garlic, dash of cayenne), plus

3 rounds of insanely concentrated fresh veggie juices that included stuff like kale. Overall, there were at least

5 instances when I felt like I would rather get my stomach pumped than endure the over-full feeling for another moment, but that's just

1 of the hazards of another great

3-day weekend among pals.

I Don't Know About This Blog-Tagging Business the Kids Are Up To, But...

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Locate the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged me.

"So how are things progressing with Ms. Sullivan?" he asked.
Alioto, as Martel had hoped and expected he would, blew up.
"Those sons of bitches! I'll tell you this, I'll sue the Chronicle when I get through with this trial and within the year I'll own that fucking newspaper!"

...on the case of Mondavi v. Mondavi, as recounted in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, which I coincidentally started reading the week before a 94-year-old Robert Mondavi up and died. (Moral: Drink your wine, kids, and live to 94.)

So I guess I tag my sister, CJ (since he tagged me, no doubt in a fit of bourgeois ennui), Capella, Wynter, and...the Aimless Idler? Why not. Dare y'all.

December 7, 1987

Dear Journal,

Life is hard in Mr. McLeod's class. Today is Monday so we have spelling homework (yuck!). I hate spelling homework. This week our words are: herbicides, diurnal, endoskeleton, classification, arachnids, plastron, colloquial, perceived, immoral, absorption, and statistician.

Here it is December, and I still can't get over October. It really was a terrible month with the earthquake, the stock market crash, and it rained on Halloween. This month should be better. After all, Hanukkah is in only nine days. I can't wait.

Alice

I Won the Lottery

More specifically, PBS selected my Antiques Roadshow ticket application by way of lottery! So I am the proud owner of two tickets to the Roadshow tour stop in sunny Palm Springs in June. Sweet!

My life rules.

Habit Forming

It's no secret that I love settling into a good routine, and here's my routine du jour, or, more specifically, my routine du Saturday. The blue-eyed boy and I each like to work out at 9:30 on Saturdays, at our respective gyms in Santa Monica, so we've figured out that carpooling is the best (eco-friendliest + most mutually motivating) way.

I take Hard Body Meltdown class, which totally rules and is generally butt kicking. (I'm currently trying to decide which is the hardest workout of the week: boxing on Wednesdays, or this one on Saturdays. And I think Saturday's class edges boxing by a nose, which is really saying a lot. Both tend to make my trusty Polar heart-rate monitor beep and flash frantically.) Nothing makes me feel better than starting out the weekend with a fine Hard Body Meltdown performance on a Saturday morning, which generally encourages me to drink less and get to bed earlier on Friday nights, which is probably a good thing. I feel very much in control of my life when I am sweating like a gavone doing repeaters with weights off a step supported by four risers and managing to survive. Perhaps, even, with decent form and a half-smile on my face.

The blue-eyed boy starts out with yoga, and then likes to work out for an additional 90 minutes at his gym, which brings us up to noon, and leaves me with an hour and a half to spend alone, fresh and pumped full of endorphins after my class. That's when I leave my gym, and walk out onto the Third Street Promenade for:

1) a walk through the farmer's market. I'm not a hippie-dippie-needs-organic-all-the-time type, but I do love the feeling of scooping up some blueberries that have been picked that very morning, which I will probably use later that day in our patented yogurt sundae (the best imaginable secret recipe, conceived by the blue-eyed boy in a moment of culinary genius, now a daily staple). I usually snag some fresh veggies too, and often some cut gerbera daisies, to deliver to my mom or a friend whose home or birthday party I am visiting later. Then I carry around my bright flowers wrapped in brown paper, peeking out of the top of my gym bag.

and some combination of the following:

2) a stop for coffee or iced coffee, which I always order as "medium in a large cup," even if it's at Starbucks, and they're supposed to require you to use that grande/venti jargon (but I can never remember which size corresponds to which). And this is not because I am cheap; I use the extra room for skim milk and I don't fill it up to the top, because I am prone to spillage rather more than is the average person.

3) a recon mission at Forever 21. I don't have to tell all the ladies out there about why this store rules from top to bottom, particularly in the summertime, when everything is colorful or shiny or woven or besequinned and is typically $9.80 or under. This particular Forever 21 is the brand-new Taj Mahal of Forever 21s, and has three floors, each with multiple areas grouped by...something, I'm not sure. Usually I get excited about all the dozens of things I'm going to buy, and then panic in the face of all the choices (all the available jams, you might say), and then I flee with nothing.

4) a phone call with AE. I tell her about my workout (she's one of the few, along with maybe only the blue-eyed boy, come to think of it, who seems to have limitless interest in hashing out the full-on details of any fitness experience) and we make some plans for the weekend, because we almost invariably see each other, and also invariably need to have our ancillary discussions that correspond to any group date. It's multidimensional, all-angles socializing, and anyway we seem to have inexhaustible things to say about most topics.

Then it's noon and I meet the blue-eyed boy back in front of my gym again. He is carrying his yoga mat, and I'm carrying my gerberas, and it's such a Los Angeles scene, that it might nauseate the average L.A.-disparaging person, although I never understand why there seem to be so many of those out there. Jealousy maybe? What's so wrong with us? It seems like we might just know how to live.

Coachella Weekend 2008: Seen and Heard

A glut of dust
A naked man doing a cannonball
Hella. many. Uggs.
A tortilla being used as a coaster for a popsicle
Two grown men riding a six-foot-tall donkey-shaped piñata off a roof into a pool (N.B.: donkey piñatas apparently sink snout last in dramatic slow-mo)
A live donkey
Bangs in spades
Snow-covered mountaintops rising above 100-degree desert valleys
The entire Cathedral City police department being brought to bear on a harmless little pool party [halo]
A girl eating a popsicle while pumping gas in a bikini (come to think of it, that was me)
"Stars are just like Us! They pump gas!"
Many swimsuits cut rather shockingly high or low, many worn with fanny packs
"You're leaving? You're Ghandi?"
Acres of tents in which I was very glad not to be sleeping
Superlative lighting and art installations
Portishead and Prince
Mustaches transcending irony into another category I can't even name
Something about gladiator man-sandals paired with a Speedo?
A giant-size Gold's Gym T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves worn by a woman in a look that so poignantly and freakishly evoked my junior-high years it nearly made me turn into a pillar of salt to gaze upon
A lawn turned entirely to mud that will need to be resodded for sure
Copious beans and rice
Churros
Only one small puddle of barf, surprisingly
"It doesn't make sense to set up an ancillary towel camp poolside, when we have our base camp here on the grass." (Not my words in this case, but words I would have said because, hello, it's strategic.)
A man covered in paint and neck tattoos wielding a mallet
"This dive is called 'Call 911.'"
"This dive is called 'How We All End Up in Tomorrow's Paper.'"
My odometer flipping to 10,000 miles
Insane amounts of good clean fun

Thanks for the memories, Coachella 2008!

Spring Break '08

Tonight was going to be my first workout since returning from vacation last night around midnight. Running a little late for boxing class, I swiftly kicked off my work shoes in the locker room to swap them for my gym shoes when I looked down and realized...those aren't my feet. Whose feet are those? The toes look different. Stumpier, shorter. The ankles are fatter. Why? Oh wait, both legs are swollen from toes nearly to knees.

I started to run through all the things that had happened on our big Yucatan trip that could have resulted in this. Walking in Merida in skimpy sandals, I'd kicked the back of the blue-eyed boy's foot and had gotten a bruise on my pinkie toe that had turned all the colors of the rainbow (of which I had taken a million photos, Flat Stanley-style, posed with iguanas and ruins and things). But the toe was feeling better now, so it couldn't be that, could it? Shockingly, I hadn't gotten any notable bug bites, or did I, without realizing it? Ah, or was it the sunburn? On Sunday, on a beach in Tulum, the blue-eyed boy and I both turned red as lobsters (a trite expression for a really scary and painful experience) in a regrettable turn of events, which, I feared at that moment, would change the course of our trip from awesome to barely withstandable. But it didn't. Like Destiny's Child, we're survivors. And our trip freakin ruled, for real.

Here's how it went down.

On Thursday we flew into Cancun, rented a hooptie-ish Nissan Tsuru (which makes me laugh, because Tsuru is just like a Yiddish word meaning, roughly, aggravation, or like, issues, as in "girl has major tsuris," or at least that's the way I use it, which may be kind of a bastardization), and drove by way of the very expensive toll road (the cuota) all the way to Merida, the capital of the Yucatan. The 300-peso or so road offers only one stop, in Vallodolid, and is almost curiously well marked with signs that mostly tell you you're driving too fast. It's a straight shot through nothing but jungle.

Arriving at last, we checked in to an adorable little B&B, sheltered from the noise of the rather frenetic city behind thoughtful landscaping marked by waterfalls and a secluded pool. From this HQ, we set out the next day for our first day trip, to the ruins of Uxmal. A spectacular site. I told the blue-eyed boy, "As soon as we leave this place, I am going to imagine it was all a dream." Because it's so surreal, to see that glorious pyramid rising out of the jungle. We shared the cost of a guida with a family from Seattle, who had two little boys who were very well behaved. I liked this family because the dad was inquisitive and asked a lot of smart questions, and reminded me of my dad. (Later, at Chichen Itza, we'd meet a pair of medievalists-turned-engineers who I would take to for the same reason.)

Back in Merida, after a siesta, we strolled through the town in search of the pretty filigrana style of earrings I had wanted (but apparently you can mainly only find affordable, quality versions of these in the U.S., imported from Mexico, and not in Mexico itself). We ate and ate and strolled and strolled (the toe incident happened somewhere in here), and tried to find some ballet folklorico performance at the university, but alas it was happening instead the following Friday. That allowed us the opportunity to sleep earlier and wake earlier for the next adventure, this one to the ruins at Chichen Itza. I urge you to go and see Chichen once before you die. It is spectacular.

And the thing is, it's a major tourist attraction. Tour buses filled with mainly Europeans and Asians flood into this place, but, at least from my perspective, it didn't have that touristy feel; the former city is so huge—many kilometers in diameter—that the tourists are all spread out. And the fact that it's a wide-open space surrounded by and intermingled with jungle kind of dampens any noise. Even the dozens (hundreds, probably) of vendors who hawk their pottery and embroidery and things to the hoards actually kind of add color and spirit to the place, rather than take away from it. The vast ball field, observatory, and of course the iconic pyramid were among my favorite spots, and the figure of Chac-Mool carved there in stone seemed so deeply cute to me. Loved him. Bought a magnet bearing his likeness. See? Vendors.

Another thing? It's hot as all get out in Chichen Itza. We stayed three hours, but could have explored for days if not for A) it was suffocatingly hot and B) we, like, have jobs in California.

N.B.: Inexplicably the ruin sites on the Yucatan peninsula seem to have the most luxurious public bathrooms anywhere. Lots of marble. Kind of like the Wynn. OK, not like the Wynn, but more luxe than you might expect from public bathrooms in a Mexican jungle.

Moving on. Heading back toward the east side of the peninsula in the tsuris, I mean Tsuru, we stopped for a dip in Dzitnup, a cenote, or sinkhole in a cave filled with glassy fresh water. I had read much about the cenotes, including that Dzitnup offered water so turquoise and clear that "it might have been plucked from a dream." I'm going with no on that. The cave seemed a bit dank, and the water far from turquoise, with little natural light actually coming from the hole in the top of the cave. (Later, at Aktun Chen, my faith in the Yucatan's famed cenotes would be restored.)

With almost no daylight left of Saturday, we pulled into Tulum. In the darkness, we couldn't see the ocean yet (I was practically vibrating with anticipation; the beach portion of the trip had been the part about which I'd been dreaming forever), but we could sure hear the waves crashing feet from us. We checked in to our eight-room hotel; the reception desk is unmanned, so you go ask the bartender, who at his own pace finds the housekeeper, who strolls down the beach to find someone who feels like giving you a room key.

You see, there is no rush in Tulum for anything, and there is no need to throw your towel and bag down on the perfect spot on the beach before someone elese takes it because A) the spots are all perfect and B) there is no one else there. Thank god there is still a place like that on this earth. (Come to think of it, Treasure Beach, Jamaica is like that too, mon, likkle more.) Sun and wind power the hotel (both are in large supply), which has no air conditioner, but does have a ceiling fan, in which the blue-eyed boy accidentally inserted his hand while raising his arm to put on his shirt and sliced through a couple of fingers. It is fortunate that the casualty was not more significant; there aren't really hospitals in Tulum, so the general rule of thumb is, "be careful, for real."

When the sun came up, the vast expanse of beach sprawled in front of us, the sea a color so blue it requires a new word for blue, or not a word, but a gesture, or not a gesture, but a sigh. Incredible, unspeakable. You run out of superlatives quickly at the sight of Tulum.

As far as I can tell, Tulum is the playground of A) fancy, classy, adventuresome travelers with taste and at least a vague interest in yoga and B) total freakin hippies. Mostly palapas and cabanas and a few very diminutive hotels dot the beach; so too do tents set up by Berkeley types (probably at the end of their volunteer stints building latrines in Chiapas junior year) on the now completely unmanned stretches of sand formerly occupied by tiny hotels that were wiped out by Wilma in 2005. It's a peaceful commingling of types on this beach. Just peaceful and perfect.

So perfect. We walked easily along the beach a couple of kilometers to the ruins in Tulum, the only Mayan city built on the sea. We stopped for lunch at a very Corona-commercial-looking restaurant/hotel called, aptly, Vita e Bella, and later hired a fisherman to take us out to the reef where we could snorkel. I actually think I saw a barracuda, and some other great big fish, but it was a windy day in Tulum and the sea was choppy; I was seasick even swimming. (This is kind of classic, because I'd actually remembered to take Dramamine; I'd bought out the complete stock of over-the-counter therapies at the CVS in Westwood before we left). I was trying to talk to the fisherman in Spanish, but everything was coming out in Italian. It's funny how much Italian I realized I still know when I was trying to speak Spanish.

Yada yada, SPFs of all varieties, reapply, reapply, swim, sweat...look, we got real sunburned. It was bad. It was regrettable. By the end of the day, we were the big gringo jerks who were red as beets. And we had opposite reactions to the affliction: The blue-eyed boy couldn't get cool enough, and I couldn't get warm enough. I had the chills. After dinner (which I barely remember in my feverish state, but the photos I took suggest it was a gorgeous place), the blue-eyed boy sprawled out horizontally on the bed because he was trying to maximize the windshear coming from the open window. All I could do was moan, and I think I said something about needing some rum, but I was asleep by 9.

Falling asleep early in Tulum is a useful thing, because it is natural to wake up with the sun. Despite there being no technology- or traffic-type noises, there is plenty of noise indeed: The waves crash loudly and the birds' songs are, ahem, robust. It's a delightful kind of cacophony. Determined not to let our full-on gringo sunburns slow us down, we left Tulum for Aktun Chen, a spectacular sprawling cave and cenote in the jungle just north. Underground was the right place for our pink selves, and our guide shared so many insights about the geology that makes the Yucatan such an unusual place: something about it being like Swiss cheese under there, which it certainly seems to be. We wore hard hats to travel about 600 yards through many chambers of the cave; first we thought the hats were goofy props to make tourists feel like they were doing something treacherous, but we soon realized that they're actually smart tools against hanging stalagmites of all lengths. In the last chamber was a cenote that looked as clear as if there were no water there at all, only air. Faith in the beauty of Yucatecan cenotes: fully restored.

A few kilometers north still, we stopped for a quick snorkel jaunt at Akumal, a lagoon that is very protected from the open water and therefore waveless. I saw three turtles swimming together, and was just tickled. I found a piece of brain coral on the beach and picked it up. The blue-eyed boy kept teasing that customs was going to imprison me for plucking nature out of the reef, but whatever. I so didn't.

In a surprisingly uncharacteristic move, we pulled into Playa del Carmen with no hotel booked; I was almost testing myself to see if I could leave the last night of the trip to do whatever the heck we pleased, in whatever place, without totally freaking out that there was no plan. And I passed my own test. We ended up finding a completely adorable hotel, all colorful tiles and pretty bright linens...but not before getting pulled over by a Mexican motorcycle cop in aviators who was a ringer for one of the CHiPs. You see, the blue-eyed boy had mistakenly maneuvered the Tsuru the wrong way down a one-way street for a short distance before realizing his error, and we got busted. Somehow, in this moment, I spoke fluent Spanish, or so the blue-eyed boy tells me (I was so nervous and desperate, I kind of forgot what I said). Anyway, no ticket. Just a warning for the sunburned gringo and gringa who busted out the politest kind of text-book-learned high-school Spanish under pressure.

Our night in Playa was rather dreamy; the main drag, Avenida 5, is as touristy as anywhere (i.e. you could, if you wanted, buy there a T-shirt emblazoned with "I Love to Fart. Playa del Carmen") but really has charm and elegance somehow too. That night, I refused to take my glasses off in bed because that would be acknowledging that sleep was coming, and that would be acknowledging that the last night of our trip was over.

Not to waste a moment, we hustled the next day to Cozumel by ferry for a snorkel session amid parrot fish and schools of others in hues like neon purple. Back at Playa, it was back in the Tsuru (on which we logged more than 1,100 kilometers, all told) for the ride to Cancun to catch our flight home.

And that's where I am now, in bed with my cat and my mysteriously swollen legs. Looking at our zillions of pictures, I can't say we looked like Beyonce and Jay Z snapped canoodling in St. Tropez by the paparazzi, which is kind of how I thought we'd look. (Seriously, how deluded am I?) But, look, it's real hot out there and you sweat and you get sunburned and shred your fingers in the ceiling fan and stub your toes a bit and get seasick and your hair gets crazy frizzy when you dunk your head in the ocean if you don't instantly reapply product.

And that's how you know you're alive.

Patrons of the Arts

Yesterday my dad told me on the phone that, while at the Getty Center on Monday with my mom and aunt and uncle, he ran into Huell Howser! Filming an episode of California's Gold right there at that moment! And they had a lovely chat! And my dad said he would not wash his hand after shaking Huell's until he got a chance to shake mine, so I could benefit from the glorious transference of my hero's germs or dirt or DNA or whatever, like on that episode of The Brady Bunch with Davy Jones.

I said, "Dad! That's even better than when mom ran into Val Kilmer at the Bel Air Hotel." And he goes, "Oh wait, Val was there too. At the Getty!" Seriously? What are the chances.

So it was my mom, dad, aunt J, uncle A, Val Kilmer, and Huell Howser all enjoying a sunny Monday afternoon at the Getty. The things you miss when you have a job.

Potential Titles for my Future Memoirs

Motivated by Coffee: The AD Story

Motivated by Fear, Fueled by Coffee: The AD Story (borrowed, with permission)

Motivated by the Calorie Counter on my Heart Rate Monitor: The AD Story

Distracted in Yoga: The AD Story

Accident Prone (Or, Why I Am Wearing This Patch Over my Eye): The AD Story

Commitment to Finding Better Airfare Than You Are Likely to Be Able to Find on Your Own: The AD Story

Apropos of Nothing: The AD Story*

Eh, You Get the Gist: The AD Story


*Current front-runner

Happy St. Patrick's Day

But for me it's no booze fest, like it was in the college years, god bless them. Now, here's what makes me happy on a Monday night:

6:30 to 7:45. Muscle through Beautiful Booty class followed by half hour on elliptical while watching CNN's Spitzer-inspired special on cheaters.

7:45 to 8:15. Drive home, while talking on Treo to blue-eyed boy, a comfortingly routine exchange of information about the day's work and workouts. Bonus conversation topics: 401k, taxes, the Yucatan.

8:15. Arrive to find a delightfully clean home. Best new house cleaners ever.

8:30 to 9:30. Cook and eat dinner, Hamburger Helper made with veggie ground beef and skim milk substitutions. (Yeah, I copped to my white-trash treat; don't sleep on Hamburger Helper.) Savor vodka/pomegranate cocktail while watching PBS. Life does not get better than Huell Howser. LOVE.

9:30 to present. Continue enjoyment of cocktail and PBS (now an Ansel Adams special filled with Yosemite porn images). Further savor delighted feeling that comes from not being out drinking in the midst of some slutty St. Patrick's Day mob scene. (Nonetheless pleased with selection of green polka-dot PJ pants.)

Perhaps this is the face of 30. I can get with that.


**
"There's something in Ansel's work that is almost gothic. It's this tracery, it's this shimmering tracery...It's not really substantial. It's like a movie screen, mm, flickers like that... It's all this surface ornament, very vital and animistic and never still. Shimmering, shaking."

Reckless Driving Incident

Today I was browsing the grocery aisles at Target when another woman shopper ran her cart right over the toes on my flip-fopped right foot. I was startled and it hurt like hell, and moreover I thought it was going to mess up my 20-minutes-old pedicure (OPI Cajun Shrimp).

The other woman was so upset that she might have hurt me that she frantically apologized over and over, and then in a flash of panic let slip out, "Can I kiss it?" But not in a creepy foot-fetish way (like that guy outside the Macy's offices in San Francisco who always used to accost us on our way up from the BART station talking about, "nice...pretty...toes..."). But in a total Jewish mom kind of way; I could just hear the words coming out of my own mom's mouth. After the foot pain subsided, I released my toes from my massaging hand, and told her, no, no, no, it's no problem, of course you didn't mean it, things happen.

Then she said, "Are you...are you Jewish?" Yes, I'm Jewish, "Are you the daughter of...?" Nope, wrong Jewish parents' daughter. But I knew the reason she'd been distracted enough to run over my foot was that she was fixed on me trying to discern whether I was this person she suspected I was. I had wondered why she'd been staring.

[Vastly oversimplified kicker:] In this town, people offer to kiss your foot after running it over with a shopping cart in Target. In the Target in Queens, they steal your full cart so they can use it themselves, and throw all of its contents, including your scarf and winter coat with a monthly MetroCard in the pocket, on the floor under the boys' underwear racks. OK, so maybe that only happened once, but it obviously scarred me.

Eliot Spitzer, Stop Trippin'

Men and their spectacular capacity for hubris and misjudgment!

The other day I heard: "Men are stupid and women are crazy." I would agree that men can be profoundly stupid, particularly when it comes to women. And I'm sure women can be profoundly crazy, particularly when it comes to men. But people, let's reel it in. Stop with the hookers and the lies, or The New York Times will find your hired help and link right to her MySpace page.

Hillary, if you get there, show these boys how it's done and do the ladies proud.